


Happy at the Emerald Bar

by sinfuldesire_archivist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drama, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-06
Updated: 2006-08-06
Packaged: 2018-09-03 15:13:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8718715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinfuldesire_archivist/pseuds/sinfuldesire_archivist
Summary: Dean feels uncomfortable at Stanford. He even waits until dark because it's easier for him to function at night, and he allocates himself an obscene amount of time sitting on the hood of the Impala watching Sam's silhouette in the dorm window from the street before he goes up.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).

**Happy at the Emerald Bar.**  
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. R. Title from Queen. For [ ](http://pipi-d.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://pipi-d.livejournal.com/)**pipi_d** , because she asked so nicely for Dean-centric fic.  
  
  
Dean feels uncomfortable at Stanford. He even waits until dark because it’s easier for him to function at night, and he allocates himself an obscene amount of time sitting on the hood of the Impala watching Sam’s silhouette in the dorm window from the street before he goes up.  
  
He’s tempted to wait until that light goes out, too, but he remembers Sam’s study habits before college and realizes he could be waiting all night.  
  
He feels intimidated walking through the doors and he feels ridiculous about that, because it’s a building. Just an old college dorm that they shove off onto Freshmen because they haven’t been around long enough to bitch about the broken showers on the third floor and the busted heating in the east wing. Except it’s not just an old building, because Sammy’s inside, and he stopped taking Dean’s calls four months ago.  
  
A few girls in the lobby give him overly friendly smiles that he’s not in the mood to return, and he makes his way up the stairs to the fourth floor. He’s pleased to discover that the other geniuses in Sammy’s hall aren’t exactly a quiet bunch. Somebody has to keep his brother from spending every waking moment in a dead silent alcove with dusty books and no company, but he’s more put-out when he sees that the door to room four-seventeen is closed and blank, not even a dry-erase board with insipid inside jokes hanging from the frame.  
  
Dean contemplates knocking, even goes as far as to raise his fist and bring it within two inches of the surface before he thinks better of it and hesitates only slightly before turning the knob and stepping inside.  
  
There’s a movie moment. Sam looks up from the excessively tall stack of papers and texts in front of him, and either Dean’s hearing’s failing or all sound in the hallway just fades the second he walks through the door, giving way to Hollywood tension. They just look at each other for a few seconds before Sam shuts his eyes, shakes his head a little and says softly, “Close the door, Dean.”  
  
Dean does, and then he waits for Sam to either reconsider and throw him out or say something difficult to hear.  
  
Neither happens for the longest thirty seconds of his life, and finally Sam opens his eyes. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I’m not really sure.” Dean’s eyes flick around the room. Sam hasn’t done much in the way of decorating. There are a few photographs tucked in the frame of the mirror, people Dean doesn’t know smiling alongside his little brother. A Cities of the World calendar hangs on the wall, still turned to February even though it’s nearly May. A small CD rack stacked with jazz albums that Dean would rather shoot himself than listen to stands in the corner of the room beside the solitary bed. “No roommate?”  
  
“Got lucky. He dropped out first semester,” Sam replies. He fiddles with the pen in his hand, something Dean’s forgotten he does when he’s anxious.  
  
“Haven’t heard from you in a while, Sammy.”  
  
Sam gestures to the desk in front of him. “Well, I’ve been busy.” He looks tired.  
  
“You sleeping at all?”  
  
“You came here to lecture me about my health?” Sam raises an eyebrow.  
  
“Nah. I don’t see enough of California. Thought I’d drop by while I was here.”  
  
“And what, we’d chat about our happy-go-lucky childhood?”  
  
Dean scowls at him. “You act like we were abused. That what you tell your friends here?” He nods to the pictures in the frame.  
  
“Dean.” Dean crosses the room to get a closer look at the photographs. “Come on. Why are you here?”  
  
Sam watches as his older brother plucks one of the pictures from the mirror and studies it up close. “She’s hot,” he says, indicating a slim blonde beaming from the photo, then tosses it onto the desk.  
  
“What did you expect to happen when you came here?”  
  
“Expect?” Dean shrugs, takes a seat on the bed. “Nothing. Hope?” He grins. “That’s something different.” He leans back on his elbows and gives Sam a Look.  
  
Sam takes longer than he should to get Dean’s meaning, and then he shakes his head. “Dean, no. That’s over. We’re...” He swallows hard. “We’re done now.”  
  
“Want to tell me again why that is?” Dean slides off his jacket, folds it beneath his head like a pillow. Sam averts his eyes from the strip of skin where Dean’s shirt rides up as he lies back.  
  
“Because it’s not normal,” he says quietly and clicks the pen a few times before putting it down.  
  
“And?”  
  
Sam chews the inside of his cheek. “And it’s fucked up.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’ve been studying, Sammy, but I gotta tell you, college has done nothing for your debate skills.” They stare each other down for a few moments. “Come on. At least make my visit worth the gas money it took to get here.”  
  
Sam is shaking his head, and then he’s slowly nodding. He gets to his feet, stumbles the three feet from his chair to the bed and Dean smiles.  
  
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he warns as Dean shifts on top of him, threads his fingers in his little brother’s hair, kisses him in a way he shouldn’t, and suddenly, Sam remembers full-force why this was always so forbidden and so perfect before he left. Not that he’s ever forgotten in theory, but he can taste weak coffee and diner mints and he remembers things he doesn’t want to about a life he’s been trying to lay to rest.  
  
There’s a dull ache in his chest as he pulls back gently to look Dean in the eyes. “Nothing’s going to change,” Sam says, and Dean ignores him as completely as possible. He reaches between them, unzipping zippers and unbuttoning buttons and completely undoing all of Sam’s strategic rebellion of the past year.  
  
“Stop talking, Sammy. I get it.” He doesn’t get it. Not at all. He knows why Sam left, of course, all of the reasoning his brother explained to him coldly from four hundred miles away the first time he phoned, but he never got how Sam could actually do it.  
  
What's left to them without family is a mystery to Dean, but not one he's ever wanted to solve. And he's already picking up the clues.  
  
“I missed you,” Sam whispers when Dean pulls back, allowing himself room to pull off his shirt, and it’s quiet enough that he can’t be completely sure he really heard it, and he refuses to hope that he did.  
  
Mercy’s on his side, and he’s spared having to focus on that thought. Sam reaches downward, and Dean is struck by how much he misses those fingers. Longer, thinner than his own, and so often, his hands don’t feel right in the nighttime when he tries to pretend that Sam never left.  
  
“Sam,” he says, face buried in the hollow of his brother’s throat. “God, Sammy.”  
  
Dean rolls onto his back minutes later, catches his breath and contemplates for a moment what to do with the uneasy look Sam’s giving him before deciding to pay it no mind.  
  
He lays a hand flat on Sam’s chest, partly because he wants to keep contact and partly because he’s afraid that if he lets go, Sam will come to his senses and bolt. He shifts his weight, moves downward, and tugs at his brother’s jeans. He can feel Sam’s heart racing beneath his palm.  
  
Dean lowers his head and smiles inwardly when he hears Sam whimper, because here and now lets him not think about what happens in about fifteen minutes when this is all over.  
  
“Jesus, Dean.” It doesn’t take fifteen minutes. It takes less than ten, and Dean tries not to think about how good Sam looks like that, flat on his back with his skin flushed, his hands fisted in his bed sheets like he’ll fall away from the world if he lets go.  
  
There’s silence, except for labored breathing filling the small room, which suddenly seems too big.  
  
“I was done with this,” Sam says finally, and Dean can hear the threat of tears.  
  
“Sam.” Dean lies down on his stomach, props himself up on his elbows, studies his brother’s face. “If we were normal, we wouldn’t be us.”  
  
Sam doesn’t look at him when he says, “Would that be so bad?”  
  
Dean knows he says it on purpose, trying to give them an easier way out of this, because shouting is simpler than not. But if Dean had wanted simple, he wouldn’t have come here at all. He refuses to take the bait, just sits there instead.  
  
Sam zips up his jeans and grabs his shirt from the nightstand. He gets to his feet, paces the length of the room twice before he sinks down in the chair behind his desk and picks up that goddamned pen. _Click._  
  
He looks down at the books in front of him, doesn’t even make eye contact. “You should go, Dean.”   
  
In that moment, Dean swears to himself he’ll never say that to another person, one-night stand or not, but he knows it’s the best he’s going to get from Sam.  
  
So he leaves. Back through a noisy hallway and past smiling coeds, back into the accommodating nighttime. Drives his beloved car to a cold motel and lies on top of the heavy, flower-printed covers for hours, pretending he can sleep.  
  
 

*

  
  
“How’d it go?” John Winchester asks, handing the diner menu back to the tired-looking waitress without taking his eyes off his son.  
  
“Typical haunting.” Dean shrugs and swallows half of his coffee in one go. “Only gave me a bit of trouble. The body was never found after the bastard died; couldn’t burn it. Exorcisms never were my thing.” He grimaces and tears open a new packet of Sweet’n Low, then dumps it into his cup.  
  
“I meant—how’s your brother, Dean?”  
  
Of course he did. And this is one lie Dean practiced aloud in his rearview mirror on the way back from California, because he can bullshit authorities without breaking a sweat, but his father is a different matter entirely. And his father is smart enough to know the distance from San José to Stanford, to know that Dean would try.  
  
“He wasn’t there,” he says, trying to keep the tempo of his voice casual. “Roommate said he was away for the weekend. With a girlfriend.”  
  
He avoids John’s eyes and hopes that it’s a simple enough lie that his father won’t question it.  
  
Dean chugs the rest of his coffee and flags down the waitress for a refill, waiting for a reaction.  
  
John Winchester nods slowly, then pulls a worn, leather-bound journal from his bag. “Tell me about the haunting,” he says, flipping to a fresh page, clicking his pen to life. “Everything’s in the details.”


End file.
